The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to content delivery, and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to content delivery through a distributed content delivery system in which a plurality of content objects are managed and delivery by local management and delivery servers assigned to each segment of the content delivery system.
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet, i.e. the World Wide Web (WWW) for serving content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents, etc.), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, social networks and/or the like.
Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their audience of end-users. In turn, a CDN pays internet service providers (ISPs), carriers, and network operators for hosting the delivery servers in their data centers.
CDN nodes (servers) which may reach extremely high numbers are typically deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple backbones in order to reduce bandwidth costs, improve page load times, increase global availability of the content and/or the like. In some of the CDNs, the CDN nodes may be distributed over large numbers of geographical points of presence (PoPs) while other CDNs may employ a more centralized deployment in which the CDN nodes are concentrated in a small number of PoPs.